Posts Tagged financial crisis
What is the relationship between debt and growth?
Posted by Stephen Clarke in Economics on 30/01/2012
Last Friday the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) announced that it had estimated the growth in American GDP in the fourth quarter of 2011. The BEA estimated that the American economy had grown at an annualised rate of 2.8 per cent. This shines a harsh light on the current economic growth, or economic contraction, of the British economy, which shrank by 0.2 per cent in the final quarter of 2011.
We’re going to need a bigger bazooka!
Posted by Stephen Clarke in Economics, European Union, Politics on 28/10/2011
On Thursday some greeted rises in world stock markets as a sign that the EU’s bail-out ‘bazooka’ had worked in scaring away speculators and reassuring the markets. Today’s news that Italy has had to sell 10 year bonds at a record high price indicates that simply inflating the bail-out fund is no panacea.
Knowledge is power, but only if someone’s listening
Posted by Stephen Clarke in Economics, Education, Politics, Social Cohesion on 27/10/2011
By Emily Clarke
The recent media interest in the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London Stock Exchange movements has certainly been mixed. From sympathy to contempt to exasperation on the part of St Paul’s cathedral staff at least, the protests and people’s reactions to them are proving difficult to pin down.
Warning Hymn of the Tiger Economies
Posted by Stephen Clarke in Economics on 06/10/2011
It is not clear if David Cameron was really planning on telling ‘households – all of us’ to pay off ‘credit card and store card bills’ or whether he really just meant that in general ‘the only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts’. Whatever Mr Cameron’s original intention, it would be worth politicians, at home and in Europe, thinking about the relationship between debt, spending and austerity.
A tricky balancing act or an impossible one?
Posted by Stephen Clarke in Economics on 12/09/2011
Today the Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) released its final report. Little has changed in terms of the recommendations of the Commission since the interim report, and as expected the result is a balancing act between a number of different goals. While bankers and their bashers may both criticize the result, it is clear that the Commission has done a good job considering its tricky task. The bigger question is whether the balancing act the ICB has attempted, works in practice.
Eurobonds – blue or red?
Posted by Stephen Clarke in Economics, Politics on 15/08/2011
In the Matrix Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) asks Thomas A. Anderson or Neo (Keanu Reeves) –
You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
Soon investors could be offered both in the form of blue and red Eurobonds.
